Insights on the current state of planning

Hello everyone,
I want to present our current plans for the next three month period and give you a glimpse at what we want to do in the coming year.

As you can see, we’ve put a lot of effort into releasing content and features this year (including big changes like 3D). We’ve also been working hard to improve our communication with the mod team and the community (i.e. you), and we have received a lot of positive feedback, several great suggestions and tons of encouragement that we are on the right track.

We have some serious plans for improving the accessibility even further, adding new features for low- and high-level players and in general keeping the game fresh for the coming years. The general attitude towards DarkOrbit is not to treat it like an aging dinosaur, but like it has been released just now. We see a great future for this game and community.

Many of the changes and improvements we have lined up have multiple purposes. For one they will make the game easier to maintain for our artists, coders, and designers. Secondly, these changes reduce the amount of work required for adding new stuff for you to enjoy. But, as we hope is more obvious, these changes are also making immediate improvements for players, new and old, right now – week to week, and month to month.

On that note, our current plans are to release the Kuiper Gate (formerly known as “Streuner Gate”) after the Halloween event (where you will find new drone designs, an event gate and such). We will also be publicly testing “Equipment in Client” (EiC) which improves the equipment management and hanger experience, while laying the groundwork for the “Assembly” feature.

With EiC we are moving the Hangars off the website and into the client. This means you don’t have to switch between client and website, and supports our adding a crafting system (“Assembly”) for you to refine and craft high-level and rare items from “old” low-level items cluttering the inventories.

Next year we will move more features into the client. And yes, we are aware of the real-time boosters issue and are discussing plans for that.

Another thing we want to do is to split vanity designs and stats. We want you to have a much wider variety of options and so we are going to start with splitting drone vanity designs from drone bonuses. So you can define yourselves which bonuses you prefer and how your drones should look like.

Following up on these steps and features in 2016 we will continue adding to these by moving the Galaxy Gate builder, the Tech Factory and the shop into the client. We want to release more content for low- and high-level players (a new Galaxy Gate is also penciled in). We also want to expand the customization system.

While all of this is happening, we’re also continuing research and work on solutions for “improving server populations,” reducing cheating, and the Jackpot Arena. And we are not forgetting that there is a lot of balancing to be done to continue our journey to bringing back the “free-to-play” feeling.

If anyone has some suggestions or helpful questions on any of the topics above, please feel free to share them with us. We may not answer directly but every feedback is taken into account to determine the actual direction of every feature.

So this is what we have so far. How do you like it?

Yours,
Kerensky